Authors: Elizabeth Bear
“Good trick!” Temur yelled, leaping from his coffin with a naked blade brandished in his right hand. “Remember that one!”
He didn’t imagine Samarkar could hear him. He couldn’t hear himself. But she tossed him that short dagger, and now he had a parrying blade in his off hand. He moved forward, the wizard at his back as one of her bulletproof veils of shadowy, flickering green light swept like a curtain all around them. The Nameless collected themselves and rushed; their swords rang off the wards as if from chain mail. Like chain mail, the wards swung and rippled under each blow, and Temur felt Samarkar sway with the battering. This was not a stalemate, then, but a temporary defense.
He stepped to the veil and stabbed through it; it parted for his blade, and an assassin staggered back. Not hit—he hadn’t been so lucky—but surprised by the blade’s emerging where his own would not penetrate. It made an opening, which Temur—Samarkar sidling backward behind him—rushed to occupy. They were three steps closer to the foot of the stair spiraling up the walls of the chamber. The opening to the aqueducts lay behind them, on the other side of the Rahazeen—and Temur didn’t fancy a fight through a maze of tunnels about which he knew less than nothing. If they were as elaborate as he suspected, he and Samarkar might win free only to starve down there.
“How do we get out of here?”
She still couldn’t hear. Everything was muted, almost febrile—the rattle of swords, the shouts of Nameless warriors. Temur identified them because he knew they ought to be there, not because he could make out the sounds. He caught a glimpse of the Rahazeen woman. She was pushing forward again, her right hand hanging awkwardly, a scimitar in the left. She pointed it at the wards and muttered—by the moving of her lips—
something.
A savagely green spark, sun-bright and seeming to drift as slowly, left the tip of her sword and lazily spanned the gap between blade and wards. As it touched the wards it seemed to dissolve, to melt a gap in them, a ring of actinic brilliance washing the darker jade away. Temur felt Samarkar stiffen against his back and the gap slammed closed, but now the whole of the wards seemed thinner and more diffuse.
He felt her voice vibrate her torso, but couldn’t make out the words. He knew what the gist of them must be, however—
we can’t let them bring the fight to us.
Those stairs were their way out, and once they were on them—well, they would be exposed to missile weapons from the outside, but Samarkar had just proven definitively that she could deal with guns, and the narrowness of the staircase would keep them from being flanked. It was just a matter of reaching them—
The peal of hooves on stone cut through the cottony hum in Temur’s ears as nothing should have. Each footfall rang as those of the Qoroos—that mythic one-horned beast that could walk on water or across grass without bending a blade—were said to, a sound so perfect even the deaf could hear. He glanced up through the veil of Samarkar’s ward as another heavy-bellied spark swelled on the Nameless woman’s sword tip, and saw—
Bansh, saddled and bridled, wheeling at the top of the steps to—impossibly—descend them. She lowered her head and charged down the spiral staircase at a canter, running as easily as if on level ground. Around them, most of the Rahazeen had whirled, aware now of an impending threat from behind. Samarkar too swung around, the need to watch Temur’s back forgotten as the sound of ringing bells swept closer.
“Horses can’t climb stairs,” said Temur numbly. He glanced at Samarkar in time to read her lips as she answered,
Apparently this one can.
Two of the Rahazeen unlimbered bows; Temur felt fear swell his throat as one nocked an arrow. He lunged, blade and arm piercing the ward before it caught his body, but came up short. The arrow flew—
—So did Bansh. Her sparse tail snapping behind her, the mare spun on the steps and kicked off, leaping from a height that should have shattered her legs when she landed. Samarkar gasped, her fingers suddenly tight on Temur’s elbow as the mare sailed majestically into space. She tucked her legs like a dancer, back arched—and fell like a stone.
Temur was already running toward her when she landed, Samarkar keeping pace and keeping the wards around them. Bansh stumbled as she struck sand-scattered stone, but somehow stayed upright and converted the energy of her leap to a forward gallop. Three strides, four, and she was among the Rahazeen, scattering them as Temur shoved both knives through his sash, then beside Temur and Samarkar as Temur scooped an arm around Samarkar’s waist and with the other caught the war saddle’s high pommel. He kicked off, feeling the strain as he found a stirrup and slung himself into the saddle, a sharp twinge in one thigh. And then he was up, fumbling for the reins, Samarkar with her arms flung around his waist as she struggled to find her balance on the horse’s rump.
“Go!” Temur shouted. “Go! Go!”
Bansh wheeled in one stride, leapt into a Rahazeen brandishing a sword and trampled him underfoot, and charged back toward the steps as Temur grabbed Samarkar’s gloved wrists in both hands and held her with all his strength. Arrows shattered on stone around them as Bansh galloped up the stairs. Samarkar seemed to get a better grip on the saddle. Temur hesitantly released her wrists to grab his bow, slung in its usual place by his knee. Red stained his leg, soaking the white cloth of the Uthman trousers he wore, though there was no pain yet. He had stuck himself on the unsheathed dagger still shoved through his sash when he swung into the saddle.
He’d bind it later. It was a stab wound, and oozing more than welling. The danger would be heat in the wound, later on. Now, he found arrows in his quiver, and as Bansh charged up the steps circling the cistern, he returned volley toward the Rahazeen rapidly losing ground as they ran up the staircase behind. Another snort, another surge, and Bansh was over the top, in a vast domed chamber with open, pillared sides. Once it had sheltered the cistern; now it gave shade to a bustling market. The mare darted through the crowd, dodging pedestrians and carts, leaping a laden donkey as easily as if two grown people were not clinging to her back.
Samarkar squeaked and slid as they landed, and Temur clutched her arm again. His hearing was returning; he could make out the cries of those Bansh narrowly missed, the excited yells of the pursuit, the shrieks of children thrilled by the running mare. Many turned to them, a few reached out. One, Temur saw, grabbed after a rope. But the bay was gone before anyone could touch her, pale dust puffing from her hoofbeats, and then they were out in the sun among the glistening blue-and-white buildings of Asmaracanda, lost in the flow of traffic, climbing the spiral city as it rose within its alabaster walls—ascending, ascending, gone.
* * *
Bansh dropped to a canter and then a less conspicuous trot a few streets on, finally slowing to a walk that would have been entirely unremarkable if it were not for the swelling red patch on Temur’s thigh. He dragged a fold of robe across it as Samarkar slid from the horse’s rump and came on his left side, standing on tiptoe to see.
“Temur—” she protested, the sickly scent of blood rich in her nose.
“No,” he said. He laid a hand on her shoulder and lowered his voice, spoke in Uthman. “It’s a scratch. Walk. Like a man, if you can. We can treat it when we’re safe inside the museum of Juvaini Ala-Malik.”
* * *
The Nameless commander came upon Hrahima like a butterfly made of blades, and she felt a moment’s respect. She parried—forearm to flat of his longer sword, turned to the side to let the shorter skim her ribs. She would have trapped it with an arm, but the assassin was fast, for monkey-kin, and tried a draw-cut that Hrahima avoided by the narrowest of margins. Another struck at her while she was distracted; she parried with a flat hand and nearly succeeded in putting the offending dagger into one of the man’s own compatriots.
At her flank Brother Hsiung was a blur of fists and cropped head and wheat-flour-colored robes, always where the knives weren’t. But there were too many, from all directions, and Hrahima and Hsiung no longer had the advantage of ground. Hrahima could leap away, lead them on a chase through flapping tents and corrals of panicked animals—if one did not slaughter her as she turned. She might be able to get an arm around Hsiung’s waist and drag him with her—or he might slow her down enough that they would both be cut down in their footsteps.
Another wave of Nameless were arriving behind the first. Hrahima caught their scent, heard the running feet, saw the bob of veiled heads over the welter of combat. The Nameless leader closed again; another passage of arms where his allies covered his flanks and meant she could not use her weight and strength to her advantage.
There was a solution. An option other than death or capture, hers and Hsiung’s. An option she should have avoided using … one she had, until now, been successful in avoiding using. She could either keep her honor and her anger, her refusal to accept her personal tragedy was a necessary part of the Immanent Destiny—the root of her exile, of her shaming—or she could prove herself a hypocrite and save her own life and the life of an innocent man.
The blades—and the Nameless—came faster now, a whirling storm of knives. For herself, Hrahima wouldn’t have done it. But it would be different letting Hsiung die for her pride—and Temur and Samarkar, too, probably, if the means of escape were not ready whenever they came out of the sacred city.
It took a certain courage and a certain bloody-mindedness to turn your back on a god that dwelled within one, that offered strength for the taking if only you acknowledged it. Hrahima knew too well the temptation of that extra strength—
She didn’t need to close her eyes to imagine a tom’s musty scent filling her senses. She didn’t have to cover her ears to hear a cub’s laughing snarls as she wrestled with her father.
A blade cut her—not badly, but enough. Another. A soak of blood spotted Hsiung’s torn sleeve, spattering her with warmth as he once again parried. More Nameless. More still.
The Sun Within was there, just under Hrahima’s breastbone. She felt it burning, bright and strong and full of a power that would let her vanish from the very sight of these monkey-kin, snatch one up with her and draw from him the answers to all her questions—and she could feel, frail as a glass bauble, the barrier of will she had erected around that strength that wanted to flood her, protect her, use her—
So easy to touch. So willing to help. So redolent of capitulation to the ideal of the Immanent Destiny.
No,
Hrahima thought. Breath burning her, arms dotted with bruises and slices.
She caught Hsiung around the waist with one arm, the Nameless leader—swords and all—by the wrist with the other—and leapt with everything that was in her. Leapt beyond the capabilities of any of the monkey-kin, and most Hrr-tchee.
And if the Sun Within leant her strength there as well, at least she could pretend to herself for a little while that she had held on to her integrity.
16
Tsering would have liked to have sat with Ashra while she slid in and out of fever and ague, but there was no relenting in her duties to all the sick. The empress and her ladies arrived, arrayed like peasants in trousers and aprons, their hair braided up beneath masks—and that alleviated some of the pressure. But the truth was that there were just not enough people to tend all the sick; that more kept sickening despite everything they could do to mend the wards; that Tsarepheth lay so uneasy on the riverbanks that even a wizard hesitated to walk through her streets alone; that the Cold Fire tossed uneasily and would not be coaxed to return to its rest of long centuries; and that Ashra was not getting better.
She was strong, stubbornly healthy and fierce with it. At first, Tsering dared to hope. She saw Ashra rallying, saw the monstrous things she coughed out of her lungs, clutched her moments of lucidity as proof that all the vaunted skill and magic of the Wizards of Tsarepheth could save this one life—and if they could save this one life, they could save more.
But it became obvious that the infection in her lungs was turning into pneumonia, that her moments of lucidity were fewer and briefer, that—as predicted—the healing ale was not maturing fast enough to be of service. Tsering toiled beside the empress and kitchen drudges both, wearying under the burden of service, and saw wizards who had found the fullness of their power as helpless as was she. More died, and more. Pyres could not be constructed to hold them all. And now, even a few of the wizards and the palace staff began to fall ill. Not because of some unanticipated vector—Hong-la and Anil-la were confident that they had correctly identified how the demonlings spawned—but because exhausted people made mistakes, and a wizard who fell asleep outside, away from the wards of the Citadel, was as easy prey for whatever invisible forces laid the demonling eggs as would be any other woman or man. Jurchadai and the other shaman-rememberers were working their own wards around the city, accompanied by younger wizards and men-at-arms, but it was a slow process—especially as Yongten-la had decreed that no wizard go out unaccompanied, or even in small groups, until the civil unrest eased—which it showed no signs of doing, as the Bstangpo kept his royal guards closer and closer to home.
Still, Tsering came back to Ashra when she could. She held her hand, watched her lips split with fever, comforted her. She watched the Aezin woman’s eyes grow glassy and the flesh sink over her bones.
Hold on,
she thought.
A few more days now. Hold on harder.
Somehow she did, when Tsering would have said from the rattle of her breath that every hour might be her last. Until the ale matured, black and pungent. With Hong-la watching, Anil-la holding the beaker, Tsering herself dripped the first dose into Ashra’s throat from a glass pipette.
It seemed to help. Tsering convinced herself that Ashra rallied, in the hours that came after, that she breathed easier. Or perhaps it was just that she’d grown too exhausted to cough any longer. All those around her, those who had fallen ill at the same time, had long since died and been replaced by the less ill. Ashra, too sick to be moved, lay behind screens to spare the newly infected the sight of what the future held in store for them.